India is ageing , and the most recent official figures show how quickly this is happening. This represents a small national increase, and while significant, is not the most interesting aspect of what the data reveal. The National Family Health Survey – 6 factsheets, released in August 2026, indicate that the proportion of Indians aged 60 years or older has reached 12.9%, up from 11.8% in NFHS-5, some four years earlier.
Based on the available fact sheets, there is no way to know how common hypertension is among the elderly in India, how this prevalence differs from State to State, or whether the States ageing most rapidly are also experiencing the steepest increase in chronic disease among older adults. There is a deeper design issue underneath this. Above that age, Indians appear in the survey only as a line in the household roster and, if selected, a blood pressure cuff and a glucose reading. The elderly are enumerated. They are not interviewed. India possesses the necessary equipment to deal with these questions. The Longitudinal Ageing Study in India , conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences, was designed precisely for this purpose. It is a major piece of infrastructure. For a policy programme being expanded this year, a baseline that is eight years old cannot be considered up-to-date evidence. Once data has been collected, it loses relevance over time, and this decline in value is most rapid in cases where the underlying population is changing quickly. (Tanya Singla is a research student, [email protected], and Megha Jacob is an assistant professor in the department of economics at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, [email protected]; Karan Babbar is an assistant professor of economics at XLRI Jamshedpur. [email protected])
When it comes to hypertension and high blood sugar, the two main indicators of India’s burden of non-communicable diseases , both conditions are recorded for adults aged 15 and over. Thus, a 25-year-old and an 85-year-old are placed in the same statistical category. NFHS interviews women up to 49 and men up to 54. So even where we have a measurement for a 70-year-old, we have very little to explain it with: nothing on their tobacco or alcohol use, whether they are on treatment, whether they sought care, whether they still work. In its first phase, it included more than 73,000 adults aged 45 and over, gathering information on their health conditions, their use of and expenditure on healthcare, economic circumstances, social networks, functional health, and biomarkers. The problem is that the first wave covers the period 2017 to 2018.
